


i. spiresong

by foundCarcosa



Series: Spire-Crossed: A Fanfic/Fanmix Project [1]
Category: Fable (Video Game)
Genre: Gen, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-08-09
Updated: 2012-08-09
Packaged: 2017-11-11 19:19:19
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,421
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/481974
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/foundCarcosa/pseuds/foundCarcosa
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>[ accompanying song: "Drumming Song" by Florence + the Machine ]</p><p>The Spire takes Lucien, making him a slave to the sludgy heartbeat that emanates from its walls.</p>
            </blockquote>





	i. spiresong

**Author's Note:**

> I swallow the sound and it swallows me whole  
> Till there’s nothing left inside my soul;  
> As empty as that beating drum,  
> But the sound has just begun
> 
> As I move my feet towards your body,  
> I can hear this beat it fills my head up  
> And gets louder and louder  
> It fills my head up and gets louder and **l o u d e r** …

Garth is unconscious when the Commandant tosses him at the feet of its master, unbound but still harmless — the Shard had sapped his Will and energy both. Lucien nods briskly at his loyal servant, flicking his fingers in a gesture of dismissal. “Thank you. That will be all.”

The mage doesn’t stir when Lucien crouches and rolls him over, flicking the single eyeglass off and letting it dangle from his finger before placing it on the desk beside him. He doesn’t stir when Lucien leans in and peels back the eyelid of his left eye, staring into the milky white depths. “Do you see me now?”

But this time, it is Lucien that sees.

_“This is absurd. You have to come back,” Garth insists. “You have a duty to Bowerstone. You have a duty to **Albion!** ”_

_“I am doing my duty to Albion, Garth.” Lucien’s voice is dreamy, unhurried, his eyes drifting upwards, and Garth knows he is seeing the Spire stretch towards heaven in his mind’s eye. “Only I know what is required. This is a sick, suffering world, and for once in my life, I can finally do something about it.” He offers his hand, palm up, but Garth merely stares at it. “I told you I didn’t want to do this without you.”_

_“No, I… nngh. What is that **sound**?” Lucien’s eyes dart back down to earth to shoot Garth a questioning look at his sharp, aggravated tone, but Garth is gritting his teeth and pushing his fingers into his temples as if he’d developed a screaming headache. When he opens his eyes again, Lucien is still staring questioningly. “…Do you not hear that? The… the throbbing sound. Like a heartbeat, but much louder.”_

_Lucien’s eyes gleam. “The Spire, you mean. It’s how I knew for sure it was here, remember? The pulse, from under the sea…”_

_“Yes, yes, but it’s louder now. I’m getting an insufferable headache.”_

_“You’ll get used to it if you stay.” Again, the proffered hand, but Garth steps away from it as if it’d transformed into a hissing serpent. Behind him, beyond the anchored ship, the sea stretches like a vast sheet of glass, and all he can think is that if he had to swim it to get away from Lucien, he would. The rash of shame that follows this thought makes his body flush hotly, and perhaps Lucien sees this._

_“You are good for me — I have told you this many times!” Involuntarily, Garth takes another step back, and another, but Lucien keeps advancing, bearing down upon him. “What would I do without you? Don’t you know what will happen to me? I will lose sight, lose myself, in this place!” Reaching out suddenly, he snags Garth’s sleeve, his arm, jerks him close, and again — flash of white, flash of light — Garth Sees the man wither and shrivel and darken, Sees with the eye that shouldn’t see at all. “Help me!”_

_It takes a tremendous effort to detach himself, and even then he could only do so bodily. The necessary words have to be wrenched from him like teeth from gums. “…I can’t.”_

—

The first thing Garth hears — the first thing he _feels_ — when the fog begins to lift is the drumming sound.

It is no longer merely a heartbeat, no longer merely a pulse under the sea that grinds at his senses and makes his lines tremble. It is overwhelming, all-encompassing, and he grinds his teeth so hard that needles of pain shoot into his gums — but even that doesn’t drown out the sound.

Shivering, he pushes himself upright. The cell is frigid and spartan — he had been tossed onto a pallet of scratchy wool clad in nothing but an equally itchy pair of trousers, and as far as he can see there is nothing else in the cell aside from a chamber pot, which he uses before taking further stock of the situation.

His skin is vibrating, the glowing lines jumping and shifting as if they weren’t engraved into his flesh at all, but rather floating just above — and yet, he cannot even feel the Will that should have been coursing through them. They had been reduced to mere decoration, decoration and nerve-like conduits for the Spire’s insidious thrum. Outside of the cell, a burly man with a shaved head and a collar that should have brought him to his knees with its weight glowers at him.  
 _The Spire Guards._ Less threatening versions of the Commandant that had nearly burned down his tower to retrieve him. He considers approaching the vibrating bars, asking after Lucien, and then shakes his head. Better to not speak to them at all.

Better to not do anything at all, but wait, and gather his strength. Lucien would come for him soon enough, once informed that he had awakened, and Garth would never be truly ready for that meeting.

—

“He won’t move,” the guard complains, and Lucien shoots him an incredulous look. “He just stands there, and stares at us with that freaky eye of his. Why won’t you _do_ something with him?”

“Are you _questioning_ me?”

The guard stalls, backing away hastily. There is nowhere to go; the inky wall looms behind him. “N- No, my lord. Not at all. It’s just… I think he waits for you.”

When the guard is dismissed, Lucien steeples his fingers in front of his nose and focuses on the flat blackness of the walls, thinking. Within his chest cavity, his heart slowly pumps black sludge to the drumming sound.

—

“It is my guards’ belief that you wish to see me.”

Garth stares unblinkingly from his place in the centre of the cell, hands locked behind his back, feet spread just so. The Will lines are already fading, ceasing their tremulous vibrating as they weaken and shrivel. But the mage himself, no… not a single sign of shrivelling, not a single hint of weakening. His right eye is full of venom as he stares Lucien down, but it is better than no emotion at all.

“Believe me, I have no desire to keep you in here. It is not how I wished this to go at all.” Lucien is beyond greying, now — his hair is a brittle white that almost matches Garth’s, hairline having recessed prominently. His hands tremble minutely, his cheekbones sinking in, his lips slightly blackened. He would look like walking death soon, and yet would proclaim in a voice reedy with madness that he is stronger than ever. And the drumming sound… the drumming sound is _in_ him. “I wanted us to work together, Garth. I wanted you to stand beside me. Do you see what your rebellion has caused me to do?”

Garth’s jaw flexes, but he remains silent. The steady thrumming underscores Lucien’s voice, pulses within it. He finds it difficult to breathe at his own pace.

“Surely you see how the Spire grows! It will be completed within fifteen years’ time, I predict it! No, no… I _see_ it. The scry, it helps me.” The dreamy, besotted look in Lucien’s eye has not dissipated, even now. Garth assumes it will only grow madder, just as the drumming sound will only grate away at more and more of his sanity.

He sees the Spire’s growth, it is true. He also sees the suicides and the homicides, hears the voices of the guards harden with time, watches the strapping young men of Albion brought in day after day after day, leaving the land they’re supposed to save bereft of sons and husbands and brothers and fathers…

“Well? I am here! Why do you not speak? Have you nothing to say for yourself?”

The mage stares into Lucien’s eyes, stares with both right eye and left, and the man takes a stumbling step backwards as he feels the veils over his mind being snatched away just for a moment — just long enough.

_If I stand near him, all I will hear is the drumming sound. If I touch him, all I will feel is the drumming sound. This is magic of the darkest order, black thirteen, the King’s red eye in the dead of night, I have lost him, I have lost him to the drumming sound and if I let him, he will pull me into it with him._

“Gan grant you mercy, Lucien,” is all he says in a low, trembling voice — a cryptic phrase from a land far from Albion — and it is all he will say for the next decade.


End file.
